ReactWise, a Cambridge, UK-based startup, is harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to transform the chemical manufacturing process, a crucial step in bringing new drugs to market. The company's "AI copilot for chemical process optimization" accelerates the standard trial-and-error-based process by 30 times, significantly reducing the time and resources required to develop scalable processes for drug production.

In traditional drug development, pharmaceutical firms rely on trial-and-error or staff expertise to determine the best method for manufacturing a drug. ReactWise's AI-driven approach, however, offers a way to shrink the number of iteration cycles required to land on a solid recipe for manufacturing a drug. The startup's machine learning AI models can deliver major savings by reducing the iteration needed to get past this critical stage of the drug development chain.

Co-founder and CEO Alexander Pomberger, a chemist by training, drew inspiration from his experience in Big Pharma, where he witnessed the tedious and trial-and-error-driven nature of the industry. ReactWise consolidates five years of academic research, including Pomberger's doctorate focused on the automation of chemical synthesis driven by robotic workflow and AI, into a simple software solution.

The startup's product is underpinned by thousands of reactions performed in its labs to capture data points and feed its AI-driven predictions. ReactWise used a high-throughput screening method in its lab, enabling it to screen 300 reactions at a time and speed up the process of capturing training data for its AI. This approach allows the company to generate thousands of data points for the most relevant reactions, train foundational reactivity models, and fundamentally understand chemistry.

ReactWise commenced capturing reaction types to train its AIs last August and expects to complete the process by summer. The company is working toward spanning 20,000 chemical data points to cover the most important reactions. This automation play also includes software that can interface with robotic lab equipment to further dial up precision manufacturing of drugs.

The UK startup, founded in July 2024, has 12 pilot trials of its software up and running with pharma companies. Pomberger expects the first conversions into full-scale deployments of the subscription software later this year. Although the company isn't revealing the names of all the firms it's working with yet, ReactWise says these trials include some Big Pharma players.

ReactWise is disclosing full details of its pre-seed raise, which totals $3.4 million. The figure includes previously disclosed backing from YC ($500,000) and an Innovate UK grant of close to £1.2 million (around $1.6 million). The rest of the funding (around $1.5 million) comes from unnamed venture capitalists and angel investors committed to advancing AI-driven, sustainable pharmaceutical manufacturing.

Pomberger believes that acceleration in process development can make a meaningful difference in shrinking the time it takes to get new pharmaceuticals to patients. "Let's look at a typical duration of a drug from start to launch: 10 to 12 years. Process development takes one to 1.5 to two years. And if we can basically speed up here the workflows – reduce it by an average of 60% – then we can get an idea of how much an effect it is," he noted.

While other startups are applying AI to different aspects of drug development, Pomberger argues that ReactWise is ahead of the pack in drug manufacturing, specifically. "We were the first to actually tackle this," he said. The startup competes with legacy software using statistical approaches, such as JMP, and a few others applying AI to speed up drug manufacturing. However, ReactWise's access to high-quality data sets on chemical reactions gives it the competitive edge.

As the pharmaceutical industry continues to adopt AI-driven innovations, the compounding effects of automation are likely to have a significant impact on the speed and efficiency of drug development. With ReactWise at the forefront of this revolution, the future of chemical manufacturing looks brighter than ever.